The Guggenheim Mystery, my sequel to Siobhan Dowd’s The London Eye Mystery, will be published by Knopf in North America on October 16th this year.
We’ve just had the first review in, from Kirkus Reviews, and it’s great! They say …
A clever junior detective must solve an art heist in this New York City-set sequel to the late Siobhan Dowd’s London Eye Mystery (2008). Twelve-year-old Ted Spark, his 14-year-old sister, Kat, and their mother, Faith, fly to the U.S. to visit Ted and Kat’s cousin Salim and eccentric aunt Gloria. Tourism soon segues into investigation when a painting at the Guggenheim, where Aunt Gloria works, goes missing and she becomes the prime suspect … Although never explicitly identified as such, Ted presents as someone on the autism spectrum—literal, unfiltered, routine-oriented—but Dowd and Stevens (Murder Is Bad Manners, 2015, etc.) depict him as neither a savant nor a saintly sufferer. Rather, Ted Spark has a “funny brain, which works on a different operating system than other people’s,” much like his fictional predecessors Sherlock Holmes and Encyclopedia Brown … Fast-paced, suspenseful, but never scary, a middle-grade mystery with a singular voice and a welcome continuation of the Sparks’ adventures.
I LOVE the fact that they mention Encyclopedia Brown, one of my favourite fictional detectives, and I’m so pleased that they enjoyed the book!
To celebrate, I’ve got two copies of The Guggenheim Mystery‘s US ARC (advance reader’s copy), to give away to two lucky people in the US and Canada. The competition starts NOW and ends on Tuesday 3nd July at midnight BST. Just comment below to tell me why you’d like to win the book, and I’ll pick my two winners on the 4th of July. Please note that this is only open to readers in the USA/Canada – I’ll have a separate competition for UK/Irish readers very soon!
